ABSTRACT
What should children do at school? What should children be able to do when they leave? It seems extraordinary that, until comparatively recently, no local or national standards were laid down for either of these two fundamental expectations. In the 1970s, the largest education authority in the country made no demands on schools in terms of the things that happened in them, nor of the things the children might reasonably be expected to be able to do at any stage in their education. Teachers decided these things for themselves. The only restriction on what they taught — and seen by the profession as an almost intolerable constraint — was the examination system, which was dominated by the universities. Even so, it applied to only a minority of children.
